


Lost In Time

by arsenicPopsicle (fortuitousOdyssey)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-05-22
Updated: 2011-05-22
Packaged: 2017-10-19 17:04:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/203146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortuitousOdyssey/pseuds/arsenicPopsicle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave is timeline hopping when he comes across an amazing discovery. He must give props to the person responsible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

Lost In Time

 

It has been said that there is a time and a place for everything.

Well, Dave Strider knew a thing or two about time.

He'd spent what seemed like days, maybe even weeks, hopping through the time-space continuum; it had probably only been seconds by his friends' standards. He'd done his best to focus on only previewing events that would give him some insight into what the team needed to do next, but he'd found that there were some places and some time periods that the Timetables just wouldn't let him go to. He assumed that these were probably important events that he wasn't meant to see and that it was a good thing the Timetables kept him away, but he couldn't help but be a little frustrated about the whole situation.

All the work and searching and never finding quite what he was looking for started building up within him, until he felt he was fit to burst. It was then that he decided he could waste a few precious seconds of normal Earth-time on indulging a whim or two. Hell, he might even find out something useful.

He decided that he was going to jump many years into the future and find out just what the fate of their race was going to be.

 

What he found absolutely floored him.

 

He was on a planet much like Earth, though it wasn't actually their home planet, and it was covered in cities and towns and farmland; most importantly it was inhabited. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people on that planet.

He was so excited and shocked by that revelation that he almost missed the oddity that was staring him in the face: all the people seemed to be some sort of strange human/troll hybrid. As soon as the thought occurred to him, Dave knew who to credit. It had to have been Karkat, with his fucking ectobiology shit, because John wasn't smart enough to pull this off.

 

\- - - - -

Dave wasn't complaining, exactly, that human and troll genes had gotten all mixed up in the new universe's primordial soup (as a matter of fact, Karkat was probably considerably more upset by it), he was just very surprised. He took a while to stroll around one of the cities, looking closely at the humantrolls all around him; they all seemed to have been gene-spliced differently. Some of them had Troll horns, some didn't. Some had pointed ears or sharp teeth, others didn't. Most of them had black hair, but there were plenty who did not. A few even had the Trolls' gray skin, though most of them seemed pretty human in that aspect. It was during these observations that Dave came to the one really shocking conclusion: all of these people were made from some combination of just the twelve trolls and the four human kids' DNA. As soon as he realized it, he was able to pick out individual traits and match them to their origin.

He sat down on a bench, watching the humantrolls pass by, speechless for once. It was only a few moments later that Dave's normally cool face was plastered with a look of pure, open shock. He watched a young man walk past him, then quickly got to his feet to follow him. The guy was tall and thin, but well built; he was wearing dark shades, but Dave could make out the familiar shade of bright red eyes hiding behind them. It was almost like staring at himself, save for a few differences; the skin was darker, the ears slightly pointed, and his bottom lip was indented by barely visible fangs. And his hair; that bright, bright red hair. That ridiculous shade of red could have come from only one source.

 

Dave had to follow him; that's just all there was to say on the matter.

 

And so follow he did.

 

\- - - - -

 

It turned out that the guy was heading to a club (fuck, so much like me) where he performed with a band. He worked turntables and sang while his bandmates backed him up with keyboard, drums and guitar; and damn could he sing. Dave wasn't a bad singer, by any means, but that kind of talent had sure as hell not come from him.

 

Dave stood clear across the room, leaning against the wall, and stared at him; he didn't see the pulsing lights and sweaty, dancing bodies between them, and he heard nothing but the music. He was pulling the man, that miraculous feat of science, apart with his eyes, searching for any of the traits he'd noticed elsewhere that he could link back to the trolls, or to Egderp, Rose and Jade, but he couldn't find a thing. Just generic, troll like traits, his own eyes and mannerisms, and that bright red fucking obnoxious hair. Slowly he came to the realization that this guy was, essentially... fuck, what, his and Karkat's kid? The thought almost made him laugh out loud.

 

What the fuck was Karkat thinking, he wondered, when he did this? What the fuck had been going through that troll's head? Was this just some ironic attempt at pissing him off, or was there an actual reason behind it? If he had any idea of the place and time the red-blooded troll had conceived of this idea, he would have brought the Timetables out straightaway and gone there fucking posthaste to ask Karkat himself what the fuck he thought he was doing.

 

He let out a soft huff of almost-laughter and startled a couple making out nearby who had forgotten he was there; a tiny smile broke through his mask of cool indifference. He would have to go and congratulate Karkat on a job well fucking done.

 

\- - - - -


	2. Chapter Two

He stayed for the remainder of the band's set (the keyboardist was obviously a stoner, and the drummer had Sollux's horns), then let himself out of the building through a side door that came out into an empty alleyway where he could summon the Timetables unseen. He held out his hands at slightly higher than waist level and splayed his fingers, and the Timetables sprung suddenly into existence. He placed his fingers very precisely on the grooved surfaces, knowing instinctively just where each digit needed to go, and moved them in just the right way to produce the desired effect. The world spun around him for a moment, everything pulsing with the deep, slow bass beat of Time that kept all the timelines flowing at the same speed.

 

When the world stopped spinning and sound returned to normal, Dave Strider stood in a hallway in the Veil, a few seconds after he had last been seen in the Medium. The walls and floors were plain stainless steel, and the door in front of him was also a plain, unadorned, flat gray. Karkat's door, of course.

Dave wondered for a moment why Karkat bothered hiding behind the color gray anymore, because it wasn't as though his bright fucking red blood wasn't common knowledge at this point.

 

He raised his fist to pound on the door, then thought better of it; instead he kicked the base of the door, the sound reverberating through the steel and echoing down the hallway. He heard a thud and a squawked “fuck!” and assumed that Karkat had fallen out of his chair.

 

“Yo, Karkat! Open the fucking door. I wanna talk to you,” he said, just a tiny hint of Texan twang in his voice. He smirked at the shuffling and muttered expletives that came from t?he other side of the door.

 

Karkat pulled the door open angrily, finding himself face to face with... Dave's clavicle. He directed his glare upward, staring into the faint outlines of eyes hidden behind the dark aviators. “What the fuck do you want, Strider? Here to annoy the proteins out of me like the rest of your little human chums? I have better fucking things to do than waste my time with you, fuckass.”

 

“Actually, Karkat,” Dave began, “I wanted to congratulate you. You've actually accomplished being pretty Gogdamn awesome... In the future, at least.”

 

“What the fuck does that even mean, grubfucker?”

 

Dave's self-satisfied smirk widened. “You wanna see?”

 

“See what?”

 

“Well, come the fuck over here and I'll show you, you Gogdamn stubborn ass,” he replied, gesturing for Karkat to get closer.

 

The red-blooded troll stared at him distrustfully for several long seconds before finally doing as he was told. He stepped closer, glaring defiantly up into the recesses of Dave's dark shades, until they were nearly nose-to-nose. Dave's eyebrows rose as he rolled his eyes and he grabbed Karkat's shoulder, spinning him around so that the troll's back was nearly flush to his chest.

 

Karkat let out an indignant little squawk of protest. “The fuck are you doing, Strider?” he growled warningly.

 

“Exactly what I fucking said. I'm showing you. I can't really explain what it is that you did, because I know next to nothing about your ectobiology shit, so it's easier to just take you and show you.”

 

“Show me what?” he asked, immediately wary of the term 'ectobiology'. “If it has anything to do with grubs, I will fucking kill you, Strider.”

“It doesn't, it doesn't,” Dave said, trying not to laugh. “Just do what I tell you. I need you to put your hands on the Timetables with me if I'm gonna take you along for the ride." He held his hands out and the Timetables appeared at his fingertips again, and he carefully positioned Karkat's hands on them, laying his own hands over top, before the troll had a chance to protest. “If you move your fingers without my help you'll fuck something up and we'll end up somewhere totally random and potentially dangerous. So hold still."

Karkat immediately stiffened. “I don't like this idea,” he said. Regardless, he made no attempt to leave or pull away, too afraid of 'fucking something up.' He figured he'd done enough of that in the ectobiology lab.


End file.
